Verifying Online News - Introduction

Authenticating Information

Most of us turn to online sources for news, whether it’s reading a newspaper online or sharing a news story with our friends and family. But news stories are one of the hardest things to verify: sometimes early reports that turn out not to be true still circulate on social media and people may spread false reports for political or commercial reasons, or just for “fun.”

Thanks to the internet and social media, we often hear about news a lot sooner than we would have a generation ago. That’s because the first person to learn about a news story can tell everyone they know, right away – and they can tell everyone they know – and pretty soon everybody’s heard the news. But if something in one of those stories is wrong – or the whole story is false – that misinformation can spread just as quickly. Research has found that media literacy education can encourage and equip news consumers to avoid motivated reasoning and to identify reliable and unreliable news[1] regardless of an individual’s political beliefs.[2] That’s why it’s important to pause for a moment when you’re about to pass a news story or some other urgent information on to your friends, and to make sure that it’s accurate and up-to-date.

[1] Edwards, L., Stoilova, M., Anstead, N., Fry, A., El-Halaby, G., & Smith, M. (2021). Rapid evidence assessment on online misinformation and media literacy: Final report for OFCOM.

[2] Arechar, A. A., Allen, J., Berinsky, A. J., Cole, R., Epstein, Z., Garimella, K., ... & Rand, D. G. (2023). Understanding and combatting misinformation across 16 countries on six continents. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(9), 1502-1513.